The anonymous life of Australia's most reclusive billionaire

SHE'S the fourth richest woman in Australia with a net worth of more than $1.8 billion.

But mining magnate Angela Bennett is so reclusive that her Wikipedia entry contains a photograph of her rival, Gina Rinehart.

The iron ore heiress, who like Rinehart inherited a vast swathe of mining interests from her father, is said to prize her anonymity so highly that she owns the copyright on pictures of an empty staircase at her former palatial abode on Perth's Swan River.

And in two decades of chronicling legal disputes over her family's iron ore fortune, photojournalists failed to capture a single image in which Ms Bennett could be easily identified - managing only to snatch blurry glimpses of the billionaire with her face partially or totally concealed.

But the two women have plenty in common, including legal disputes with their offspring - and each other - over their respective family fortunes.

While Rinehart's ongoing courtroom stoush with children Bianca Rinehart and John Hancock has filled countless pages of newsprint, Bennett's financial affairs have been more tightly guarded.

When she offloaded her mansion in Perth's exclusive Mosman Park for $57.5 million in 2009, it was the biggest residential sale in Australian history.

Angela Bennett's former Mosman Park home, which broke records when it sold for $57.5 million in 2009.Source:News Limited

Yet the media was restricted in what it could show of the awe-inspiring property, after Bennett refused to allow pictures of its interior to the published.

She reportedly "downsized" into an $8 million luxury penthouse and bought a $30 million luxury yacht.

The following year, Bennett's rich list ranking was boosted by a court decision to award her, along with her brother Michael Wright, Rinehart's $1 billion quarter share of the Rhodes Ridge iron ore deposit, to which Peter Wright had laid claim when he and Lang Hancock agreed to divide the assets of their partnership.

But Hancock died before the split could be finalised, after failing to find a buyer for their 50 per cent stake in the property - half-owned by Rio Tinto.

And the pair's hopes that their children would carry on their legacy in the same spirit of friendship went unfulfilled.

A protracted legal battle over the lucrative mining tenements and reserves ensued, with Gina Rinehart's legal team unsuccessfully arguing that Wright and Bennett were only entitled to a combined 25 per cent stake in the property, allowing her to retain the other 25 per cent.

Nine years after Bennett and her brother lodged their claim through the family company Wright Prospecting, the Supreme Court of Western Australia ruled in their favour. Rinehart lodged an unsuccessful appeal.

Meanwhile, Bennett has fought plenty of inter-family legal battles of her own.

Her adult niece and nephew sued for an 11 per cent stake in Wright Prospecting in a dispute that settled out of court for a confidential sum estimated to be as high as $65 million.

Son Grant Bennett, 47, declared himself bankrupt in 2015 after she declined to bail him out of an ill-fated deal that left him unable to secure finance to complete a $17 million farm purchase, The West reported.

More recently, her brother Julian Wright, who sold his one-third stake in the family business for $6.8 million in 1987, reportedly launched legal proceedings earlier this year alleging that he was swindled out of his birthright. The value of his former stake is now estimated in the several billions.

Executor David Lemon's legal team is set to argue that the huge slice of Wright's estate awarded by the WA Supreme Court to Ms Mead - the biggest in Australian history - was an error, and that the initial $3 million trust left to her by Wright was adequate.